Life During Wartime

The first shot in Steven Spielberg's remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is of an American flag with the sun behind it. The image is somewhat diaphanous, the fabric having the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility -- and fortitude -- of compassion in wartime. Spielberg puts us through the hair-trigger terrors of combat in a way no other filmmaker has ever dared, and yet there's a gentleness to his enterprise. He's interested in the humaneness that comes through the horror. His film is a paean to the good that survives.

The flag that we see in the beginning flies above the vast cemetery in Normandy that honors fallen Allies. After a brief prologue we flash back to June 6, 1944, the D-Day invasion on Omaha Beach, where many of the soldiers hitting the beaches are instantly, agonizingly slaughtered. We can make out a few recurring figures in the ensuing inferno, including Captain Miller (Tom Hanks), who is first revealed in closeup as a pair of trembling hands before the camera moves to his ardent, tragic face. With waves of men falling around them, Miller's platoon of seven soldiers finally storms the beach to gain the high ground against the Germans. We feel every atrocious inch of their odyssey.

This opening sequence, in which thousands of men are splayed and pulverized, is perhaps the most wrenching battle scene ever filmed. It goes way beyond what we're used to seeing in war movies. Even the greatest battles staged in film until now, in the work of directors such as Griffith, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Ford, Welles, and Peckinpah, had an overarching artfulness. The violence and terror had an aesthetic dimension -- a horrid beauty and sometimes a nobility -- that kept us from being entirely aghast at the awfulness of what we were watching.

Spielberg is attempting something much more punishingly immediate. For almost half an hour he puts us on Omaha Beach and refuses us any respite. We don't get any wisecracking Hollywoodisms to reassure us we are only watching a movie. Spielberg doesn't frame the soldiers as martyrs or heroes (though many are). We aren't made to feel that we are inside an artist's vision (though we are). Instead we seem to be looking at the collective nightmare of an entire generation of combatants -- a horror show that has once again come startlingly to life.

If you go to the movies at all these days, you realize that filmmakers have become so giddy about the new visual and aural technologies -- with their capacity for sensory onslaughts -- that they've lost sight of what can really be achieved in bringing us shudderingly close to experience. When you watch Saving Private Ryan, especially in this opening Normandy sequence, you suddenly realize the sheer power of all that advanced sound-and-picture movie engineering. One reason there has never been another battle sequence like this one is that no filmmaker of Spielberg's gifts has ever had at his disposal such an arsenal of effects.

But there's another reason to be startled: Spielberg is the first director to draw a direct line from the Vietnam experience -- as an experience of combat -- to that of World War II. This is a radical move. We accept the gutbucket gruesomeness in Vietnam movies because the nature of that war, and the way in which it was brought into our homes on television, demands such treatment. To be "tasteful" or sentimental would be an affront. (The rage in those movies is a rage of national self-immolation.) But World War II movies have almost always lacked the explicit horror of Vietnam films, because WWII has been billed as the Last Good War. Its presentation was, and to a large extent still continues to be, sanitized for mass consumption by Washington and Hollywood.

In Saving Private Ryan, the panorama is as excruciating as any Vietnam footage. The soldiers are splattered by bullets; their heads are blown from their shoulders in ripe red bursts. A man picks up his just-severed arm while another man's guts pour into the sand. The obscene squeal and thump of mortar is everywhere in the air.

For perhaps a minute in the middle of this long sequence, Spielberg suddenly shuts down the din on the soundtrack as we watch Captain Miller numbly surveying the scene. The silence is even more sickening than the sounds of carnage. With the help of his crack sniper Private Jackson (Barry Pepper), who recites Scripture to himself before each kill, Miller's platoon finally knocks out a German machine-gun nest. Miller looks back at the beach in the momentary calm. His sergeant (Tom Sizemore) says to him: "Quite a view," and it's then we see for the first time the corpse-strewn expanse of Omaha Beach. It's the deathly, reposeful image this relentless sequence has been building to all along, and it holds you: Hieronymus Bosch meets G.I. Joe.

A large number of films about WWII are in production or about to come out, including an adaptation of James Jones's The Thin Red Line. Many people have tried to explain this phenomenon by presuming that audiences are hankering for comprehensible war-movie conflicts with clearly marked heroes and villains. For such a conflict, the Vietnam War obviously won't do. Neither will the intergalactic variety -- you can endure only so many hyperspace shootouts.

But Saving Private Ryan isn't a reassuring alternative; it doesn't offer the homilies that have always drenched morale-boosting WWII movies. By throwing off the impediments of a strictly patriotic agenda, Spielberg is free to function as an artist. By going back to a Good War and concentrating so clearly on its carnage, he's putting forth the most obvious of positions: War is about killing people.

And yet Captain Miller's platoon is sent on a mission after Omaha Beach that connects to a deeper truth: War is about saving people. Miller is ordered by U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall (Harve Presnell) to take his company behind German lines and somehow locate and bring to safety a Private Ryan (Matt Damon), who was part of a misguided 101st Airborne drop and whose three brothers have all been killed in different battle zones within days of each other. Miller risks his men's lives and his own to rescue and send home a single soldier -- so that Ryan's mother in Iowa will still have a son. Miller has already lost 94 men in his command; he rationalizes their deaths by imagining the lives he will save in the long run. But the rescue of Private Ryan is a mission that bears no such scrutiny; no one in Miller's company can rationalize it, and few can abide it.

The platoon bears a superficial resemblance to the mixed-nuts brigades familiar from previous WWII movies. Besides the sergeant and Private Jackson, there's Private Mellish (Adam Goldberg), the Jewish guy; Private Reiben (Edward Burns), the Brooklyn guy; Private Wade (Giovanni Ribisi), the medic guy; Private Caparzo (Vin Diesel), the tough guy who tries to rescue little French children; and Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies), the bookish guy who has never fired at anyone before. (He's our stand-in, like the youth in Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage.) Even Private Ryan, when he's finally located, has the corn-fed all-American look we've seen in dozens of flag-waver flicks.

But Spielberg, and his screenwriter Robert Rodat, don't go in for overtly sentimental displays. On the surface these men may seem like stereotypes, but the actors give their roles a hard-edged authenticity. (As performers, they are on their own kind of mission.) We can see these soldiers are learning on the job how to make war. The youth and innocence they brought with them into combat has already slipped from their faces. They look prematurely old.

Tom Hanks has perhaps the most difficult role, and he brings it off with the best performance of his career. For most of the movie, Captain Miller is a cipher to his soldiers, but his unreachableness isn't a power play: It's just his way of not feeling too close to the men who may soon drop one by one before his eyes. And yet we can see in him what his platoon can't, or can only intuit. War hasn't coarsened him; it's opened him to a deeper level of anguish. Away from his men, he breaks down sobbing. At one point he says, "Every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel." And yet we realize the irony in what he is saying: Killing is what will take him home.

Saving Private Ryan doesn't pretend, as do so many war movies, that soldiers in the frenzy of battle are fighting for the noblest of motives or that only the virtuous survive. WWII may have been fought by the Allies for impeccable reasons, but Miller and his soldiers on their mission of mercy are thinking overwhelmingly about personal survival. There's something cauterizing (and yet liberating) about this view. For the Hollywood war movie, it represents a new and more transcendently honest approach to human experience.

And yet Spielberg, disdaining the easy cliches of war movies, understands the impulse that compels us to want to make sense of the senseless. He wants to memorialize these men, but in a way that doesn't turn them into plaster saints. He wants to make them powerfully, confusedly human. The soldiers who grouse and die to save Private Ryan come to realize that his rescue "is the only good thing we can take out of this shitty mess." It's a hard-won revelation designed to give meaning to a chaos they can no longer comprehend.

Ryan's survival is the measure of their sacrifice, and he must spend the rest of his life living up to what they have done. For Spielberg, the great romantic gesture in war is also the most necessary -- the gesture toward decency. He commemorates the soldiers in that vast Normandy cemetery in the most absolute and honorable way possible.